Susanna Codes

Crimson and Clover Honey, Over and Over Honey "Me myself I like diamonds, but baby crimson and clover". I couldn't take it anymore. I WENT BACK TO LEARNING JAVASCRIPT. I couldn't wait to learn it anymore, so I did.  Of course, I am being reminded how tiring learning coding is. (P.S. The title is from one of my favourite Lana songs that I always listen to when I am coding). Functions in JavaScript I was doing great until I came across frigging parameters. ARRRGH. Why do they have to be so confusing? What does it mean that "Arguments can be passed to the function as values or variables?" What does it mean the "The values that are passed to the function when it is called are called arguments?" What does it mean that "The parameters are specified between the parenthesis [...] and inside the function body, they act just like regular variables?" ARRRGH. Ohhhh. I frickin' see Oh. I get it now I get it I finally get it. You put in the PARAMET...

Merry Christmas from Susanna Codes I came home for Christmas. I couldn't believe how much work I'd done in the last few months. Only when I paused did my brain have time to process all of the coding questions. Coding Questions  (CSS) What is chaining? What is specificity? What is inheritance? I know what they all are, but I don't GET them How does this work? (JavaScript) Why do you have to put the break and the default in the switch/case thing? Git and GitHub - Rosana 💜💓explained Git to me in a really great way.  I will make a post when I am more intellectually inclined... The Photo The below photo of me is from when I was 19. I found it on my home computer.   I loved this photo when I was 19 because I thought I looked really fed up on it. I guess that is how I felt at the time.   But now I think that I look happy in it. And this can only mean one of two things: I was always happy and I didn't know it. Because innate happiness is our true nature. Maybe it reflect...

Keep Love Alive Keep love alive. Always. If there's something you love, then do it. Even if it's hard to do. I discovered a song today. It is the most beautiful song in the world. Yes, it is an even more beautiful song than the last two I discovered.  It's called 'Bartender' and it's by Lana del Rey and yes it is from her NFR album, and yes I do keep on discovering new songs from it, one at a time. If you love something, always keep doing it please. Always give your whole self to all of it. And don't be ashamed to put yourself out there or scared of what people think of you. I just throw my maximum enthusiasm into things. And that is what you should do, too. Here is a photo of me presenting my static Grinch website at a tech event with MAXIMUM ENTHUSIASM. Today took a turn for the unexpected I had fully planned to learn JavsScript today - yep, that's right, to move back from CSS. However, Rosana reached out to me. WHOOOO! It was a Christmas miracle 💓 Th...

"Wha-, wha-, wha-, wha-, wha-, whatever, everything, whatever." The above lyrics are an extract from my new favourite Lana song. This song in question is possibly the most healing of all time ever. The sentiment behind that lyric is that I don't care.  Except that as I realised over the weekend, when I was reflecting deeply on stuff - I really do care. I am the opposite of someone who doesn't care. I spent so much of my life pretending to myself that I am somebody who doesn't care. But I am the opposite of that. I guess I chose to use this lyric because I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment - and when I get overwhelmed it is easy to pretend not to care. But I am the opposite of that. I DO care. Especially about PROGRAMMING. This is an image from the photoshoot for the cover of the LDR album I am currently obsessed with, NFR. I don't know why but it just made me feel so inspired so I just put it here. CSS Stuff <3 <3  Codecademy Overflow This was v...

"The Culture Was Lit and I Had A Ball" I have discovered a new song by Lana del Rey.  It's called "The greatest". It's simultaneously absolutely sad and stunningly beautiful. So naturally I love it. And the title is from this song.  How can something be so heart-breaking and yet at the same time be so beautiufl? Here is a little lyric from this song. But I'm quite keen to get stuck in, actually. 'Learning Rust the wrong way' Adam, the Engineering Manager from my team (feels so great to say that because it is initially thanks to this blog that this has happened!), reached out to me and sent me a video.  He had been reading my blog, I guess, and had been seeing that I had been stressed about my learning - I kept on getting stuck on things and losing hope and falling into despair. Initially I offered some resistance to the video - I don't normally watch things which are this long. But I needn't have done this. Once I started watching the vi...

Two Lines of Thought, Makes Me Wonder What I'm Missing "Lines of Bamboo, See What You Do To Me..." Bamboo by Elder Island is one of my ultimate 'becoming a Software Engineer songs'. (I prefer the original, but here is a great live version. ) There's a story behind this. I met a man named Mark. He was an SWE approaching retirement - he was down in my hometown with his wife, visiting. I won't go into the context of how we met, but it was a miracle. It was a complete miracle. It was just meant to be. We chatted for at least two hours and at the end of the conversation he said to me "All the best of luck with your new career". I couldn't believe what he'd just said - I hadn't even committed to it yet! A few weeks later, I did, though. After I walked out of that cafe where I had been sitting and talking to Mark and his wife though, I felt like - even though I didn't "feel ready" yet - Mark had predicted something that I didn...

Gods and Monsters "No-one's going to take my soul away..." Gods and Monsters. A song by Lana del Rey, from the second edition of her first album. I.e. Born to Die: The Paradise Edition.  I have to admit though that the original isn't for me. It's surprising to hear Lana del Rey singing so low - even though she can, I prefer it when she sings a bit higher. BUT CHECK OUT THIS BEAUTIFUL COVER ! This lady does the most consistently had beautiful covers and I have learned several AMAZING new LDR songs lately - only thanks to her!!! Back to all the CSS stuff I have done a bit of CSS today.  Not a lot but at least I am learning deeply. This is what I have done. Padding Shorthand Padding shorthand goes clockwise. You can do: 2 values   goes top/bottom, then left/right e.g. padding: 40px 10px; 3 values goes top, then left/right, then bottom e.g. padding: 10px 50 px 5 px; 4 values goes top, then right, then bottom, then left. e.g. padding: 10px 40px 5px 50px; Margin and Ma...

 I C(SS) You Missed My CSS Puns I had some great feedback from my former manager that she liked my CSS puns. So naturally I had to bring these back in again. In all seriousness here's my update. I finally finished JavaScript Conditional Statements I struggled a bit on the second project at first but once I'd gotten past my anxiety around the first few steps and cross-checked them against the tutorial I saw that I was doing great. I felt the need to move back to CSS for a bit and so I retreated back to the Box Model. Back to the CSS Today I focused on the Box Model, as stated above. It's a method of styling elements (I guess?).  I learned about 3 mains things today Borders, Border-Radius(es)(?), and PADDING. 1) Borders I learned about these and these are REALLY REALLY SUPER COOL. There are a couple of cool things that I learned about them. Border styles are written in one line. They include width, style and color. Width can be done in pixels, but it also has 3 predefined key...

Getting Things Wrong So today, in a rather exciting bit of news, I got something wrong. And that is exciting because I don't normally get things wrong. And that's not only because I'm good. It's also because I'm afraid to let go of the handrails sometimes. I'm afraid to take risks. Today I took a risk on my JavaScript, and I got something completely wrong. I'm so glad that this was able to happen lol.  The biggest thing that I am trying to figure out is: WHERE did I go wrong? In my thinking - because I know where I went wrong in my code (and I have now fixed it since). So what happened? What did I get wrong? Magic-8 Ball Magic 8-Ball is a classic exercise that is used by Codecademy when using 'if'/'else if'/'else' statements. I'm not sure if they use it with all other languages but I would imagine they do too - I have most definitely done it in Python. Basically, in the JavaScript exercise, I first came up with this bit of code:  ...

Biking Home Biking Hom e is one of my favourite songs of all time, and it is from the Soundtrack of one of my absolutely most beloved movies, the Whale Rider. The Whale Rider stands for everything I love.  It stands for nature. It stands for being true to who you are. It stands for following your destiny.  It is also about a woman who makes it in a role that is meant to be for a man, defying all odds and expectations. This movie has been such a major part of the healing I have gone through in my life. In fact that's ultimately where Software Engineering emerged in my life - it came at the end of a long, long healing process. Ultimately, it couldn't have arrived more perfectly. The poster for the movie 'The Whale Rider'. Right... back onto the JavaScript Stuff.  And the Conditional Statements. Ternary Operators Right, so today I learned ternary operators.  I think I have just forgotten everything. let superCoolName = 'Susanna'; superCoolName === 'Susanna'...

Tell Me What You Love About It I've been watching '7 Years In Tibet'. And in it, the Dalai Lama says to Heinrich (about climbing): 'Tell Me What You Love About It'.  This hit me right in the heart. It came at a time when there have been a lot of changes in my situation. It has been making me wonder if I will still have as much time to code as I used to. And this has been breaking my heart. I love to code. I love to code so, so much.  I love to code more than anything else in the world. I love to code with a passion so much that it hurts my heart. Marina, from Marina and the Diamonds, said that before she became a singer she had an obsession with becoming a singer. That it 'was like a disease'. I don't want to frame it in a negative way, but I often think of this statement when I think of coding. I tried so hard.  I tried so hard to forget about it. To block it out of my mind. I told myself that I was stupid. That I already had 2 MSc's in other subjec...

JavaScript Syntax aka ARRRGH JavaScript is hard. I mean, hard. I mean, the rules in most cases so far seem the same as in the other languages I have done (Python, Ruby), which is in line with what everyone has told me, that it is most important to know one language really well first because so many of the rules had been translated across. I had planned long and hard. I had watched many YouTube videos.  I had spoken to anyone and everyone who would listen to me. And I had decided on Python. I had always planned for Python to be my 'first', strongest programming language. But then life happened. I went to a meetup for Async Brighton  and I felt something I'd never felt before in my life. A kind of a... miracle. And an inspiration. I then went to an exhibit in London at the Science Museum on Sir Tim-Berners Lee, just two days later. And then I met with Rosana a week later. And they told me that I should learn the front-end first, to be the most useful at work the fastest. And...

 What are the things I've learned so far in JavaScript? Variables In the older version of JavaScript, 'var' was used to assign variables.  Since the ES6 version of JavaScript, there are two new things (don't know what they're called) used to name variables: 'let' and 'const' 'let' means the variable can be changed further down the line (have I got this right?) 'const' means the variable stays the same, or, well... constant... Variables that have not yet had a value assigned to them store the value of 'undefined' (... apparently ...) Mathematical operators +, -, *, /, and of course my favourite, Module, % can also weirdly be assigned as +=, -=, and *=, etc., WHICH I DON'T GET .!!! Also the increment and decrement operators... I saw this a lot in the Harvard CS50 course, which I did weeks 0 and 1 of, when he uses it in C; something like i++; i--;. The typeof function... I don't know why it confuses me so much because the...